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Friday, 27 January 2017

The tale of tranquility.

Of late, my blogging skills seem to have gone for a vacation. There isn't much happening in life on the exploration front. Not many new experiences galore and neither has the candor of anyone struck that chord with me. There often comes a phase in your life when you furtively befriend clamor, for it becomes the only constant. The din at the workplace to the chattering of the transport you take to work. The more the world runs amok, the more you embrace its futility, and the more you give in to the chaos. You live with it, thinking that your involvement in the universal entropy, gives you a place in the order! While order, ironically, doesn't even exist.

This longing for your own place in this fast paced world, endows certain lifelines to you. These lifelines are boons because without them, you'll find your hallucinations about the aptness of your current world vivisected. In the noise, you avoid the noose of penance. Penance for having overlooked the vagaries of a life that was not worth living, but that you merely convinced yourself to endure, at the expense of fitting into the paltry order. And once you've avoided any considerations about the moral ineptness of acquiescing to that life, you're off the hooks. However, if you fail to do that, you give in to a force so ravaging and so grotesque, that you simply can't escape it. Tranquility!

The perilous move to surrender to this force can often result in rather dastardly consequences. The juggernaut of human progress, concomitant with the promise of prosperity, hides a lot more than it reveals, In the mist of universal cacophony, tranquility loses its place, only to be found by those who have "lost their way". And losing your way is always a pernicious misdeed in the now nearly perfect facade we call the modern world.

Human beings as they are today, are not a product of natural evolution. When homo sapiens went on to beat various other species of the same genus, it was nature calling the shots. But then, we took over the reins and produced an evolution of our own. It was the evolution of collective psyche. From individuals, we formed clans, then tribes, then villages, then towns and then cities. And just like that, the collective psyche spurned its magic. The purpose for congregation was different. From water to river basins to religion to opportunity, but something always acted as the magnet. And as folks got attracted towards the rather innocuous common objective, the lying purpose often became nefarious, and we couldn't catch a blink.

When we came together for opportunity, our actions bred inequality. When we came together for religion, our motif turned into a massacre. And likewise, when we came for water, we invented bondage basis the first come first serve principle. Our purpose always got desecrated, but the root remained true and sactimonious. And thus, emerged from the ashes of the purity of our original purpose, the myth of order. What lies beyond this myth, bemoaning and wailing while dying a slow death, is tranquility.

Tranquility is not merely the absence of din. It's what we've made it look life because of the noise that our lives now largely comprise of. Tranquility, in fact, is a state in its own right. It's the state when we get to see beyond the diaphanous curtain of morality. It is the curtain that ensues in our daily hypocrisy; the art of keeping two faces which nature certainly did not endow upon us. But tranquility, true to the peril that it presents, is too strong to make us realize its presence.

Tranquility is not akin to silence amid the shores, but the foreboding of the upcoming tempest. Like the sonorous metal utensil that lies on the shelve, untouched for days, biting dust, and suddenly on a single jerk, falls on the ground and shakes the last neuron in the brain. Likewise tranquility is a barrage so powerful and yet so surreptitious. that it's only when you witness it, that you feel the impact.

The moment you strike that curtain, you see your misconceptions char to ruins and the hard hitting reality annihilating the irascible liar in you. Deep beneath the usual go-to man, lies a suppressed giant, one who sees his horrid face only on the surface of the stream called tranquility. The absence of chaos with the compulsion of vices absconding, you surrender to revelations, more vitriolic and more condescending than the pressure to act against your will ever was!

Yes, that's true. You always knew you ere going wrong. A child's questions are never wrong for they come out of natural instinct. What you don't find right in the world is not right because you're a manifestation of unbridled nature. However, your questions either result in the elders' futile circumlocution or in you getting reprimanded, and the questions are turned into hardwired answers. But throughout your lives, you do ask some questions once in a while, only to no avail, as you fear falling out of the universal chain. The chain of following a trend, or the literal chain of holding hands together at a procession. But it will always be a chain and you are always the next victim, made to act against your will.

Now you've given into tranquility and you see the fortress of the enigma you called your life, crumbling into pits and pieces. In the splinters of the glasses from your kingdom of vignettes and achievements, you find pieces that reflect the hideous blurred and inverted image of that 'you' who did something to earn what that shred was worth. Bit by bit, you toil hard to put the entire image together and try seeing it all at once. But the sight is too grisly, and the contempt for self too labile. So you keep looking, as tranquility enshrouds the stubborn giant, which as it now turns was only the semblance.

Tranquility, I reiterate, is not the absence of chaos, but a rambunctious state of mental thought. It's a figurine of your true self, beneath which lies that suppressed motley of questions from when you were a child, and over which is plastered the palliative visage you present to the rest of the world. Tranquility is so eerie and so obscure, that while all your life you craved for something or the other. Be it that girl, that car or that promotion. But tranquility, makes you renounce, and not just eschew those earnings and those possessions, but your very own self.

Tranquility is much more than just silence. It's a stream of your virtues, winnowed away in the whirlpool of universal redemption. It is a silent reviling of the code of conduct , which you reluctantly, but eventually vowed to. And it is indeed the moratorium of the application of the same. In that sense, tranquility is a like a computer hanging for a while. All inputs resulted in a particular output and suddenly, either excessively prolonged operation or some undefined input results in erratic behavior. Likewise, despite the attempts of mankind to make our species a factory for producing more and more individuals programmed to act in a set manner, our program too goes awry, and we don't hang, but we recede to tranquility.

Moreover, just like a computer program, at times one may return from there, but more often than not, the fault was too grand not to have a long term impact. Tranquility casts a spell on you, where for the first time, not only do you confront the truth about the myth of the order which you made the holier than thou tenet of your life, but it also absolves you of the guilt to question the same. Tranquility is the catalyst that provokes you like a seductress to give into her charms. It lures the stubborn you and leaps you within in the whirl of emotional concoction.

It is in the mist that surrounds the silent shore, that the strength of the tides beneath the surreal moon becomes most prominent. Tranquility is an agent too powerful to shatter all myths, and yet too irrelevant to even exist. It is the force that exists within, but one that fights through the whims of gunfire, which it prevails through, and then suddenly presents during the ceasefire. It is the actions men take during the ceasefire that decide what happens next. Whether we all die by opening fire again, silently longing to kill each other only to attain a permanent silence, or we realize that the silence we just got is all that was ever needed. This, was the tale of tranquility. The might of the warrior of the masses, subdued by the meekness of mankind!